Legend has it that Catherine of Siena it could be the first documented case of anorexia nervosa. It was around the fourteenth century, when this disease was called 'Anorexia Santa'.
The young woman died at the age of 28, two years after voluntarily stopping eating. Catalina thus managed to prevent her father from marrying her and managed to enter the Dominican order, although with half the weight.
At that time and during the Middle Ages, the nuns were a great example for many other women. Thanks to fasting they got their period removed and thereby demonstrate that the spirit was above the flesh.
But it wasn't until 300 years later when anorexia was discovered, as we know it. A disease diagnosed by the English physician Richard Morton to two patients who refused to eat. 'Nervous eating', I call her.
Another three hundred years were necessary for the term anorexia to be coined definitively. Was the Doctor Gordon, only 26 years ago, the first who used this word borrowed from Greek terminology (an-: denial and -orexis: appetite, hunger or desire).
Since then, thousands of cases have been diagnosed and treated in medical practices around the world. In fact, it is estimated that anorexia would affect between 0.5 and 3% of the world's adolescent population and 1.5% of women between 16 and 40 years old.
Although currently around 55% of patients are cured, time has not played in favor of the disease. Today, anorexia is considered one of the mental disorders with the highest mortality (3-5%) and third chronic disease in the population aged 15 to 29, with a chronification rate of 25%.
I am not a historian, nor a doctor, nor a psychologist. Neither the data that I tell have been discovered by me. Nothing I reveal then that is not between manuals or on the network.
And then? Best, I introduce myself:
My name is M. Ángeles Pastor, I am 43 years old and I am a journalist. I don't understand statistics or psychiatry. But yes I can talk about this disease in the first person (Fortunately).
For more than 20 years I have suffered from an eating disorder. Anorexia, to be more precise. I started at 15 And I think that I managed to break up with her at 39 (ago 4).
I have lived next to a Mental illness that it has taken everything from me and caused me pain, a lot. At the same time, it has made me grow and mature, until saying enough.
As in most cases, I have spent years silencing my problem. Basically by shame. Until one decides to tell the world, contrary to some opinions, that this disease is not chosen.
Sharing experiences makes disease in something more compressible, more accessible and with fewer taboos. Silencing is giving fuel to a disorder that dies the more it is aired and the more it is exposed to light.
Not be an accomplice, not live it as one scourge, Show that it is possible to go out Y learn, is my objetive. And at the top of my desires: the illusion that my words can help whoever goes through this. From near or far, it doesn't matter.
Everything that worries a sick person, in treatment or already recovered is what I capture black on white, in each of my articles.
Do not lose sight of a disease that can tear everything away Y set limits daily is what drives us to count and not shut up.
Perhaps the same thing that many of those people who, in the middle of the Middle Ages, stumbled upon a disorder they did not understand Y they suffered in silence, until they died.
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